CLANDESTINE CHAMPIONS- 1974-1980 As a Young Boy. Robert
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CLANDESTINE CHAMPIONS- 1974-1980 As a young boy. Robert Boraks spent his summers at a cottage with his family. The Boraks' neighbours were an elderly couple who frequently received visitors. Men would arrive in cars, ofien asking young Bobby for directions to the couple's cottage. Boraks remembers being made aware that the small, hi1old man across the Street was a famous professor named Tommy Loudon, and that the visitors were his former students. Through a quirk of fate, Boraks would later on be in pan responsible for re-staning the uTRc.' When he came to U of T in the fa11 of 1973 as a geology student, someone had tried to revive the UTRC. The first moming, eight or nine oarsmen tumed up at Argos, where it became evident that no coaching or boats had been arranged. The next morning, oniy Boraks appeared and the 1973 season was over. The following year, it was Boraks' tuni to atternpt organization. "1 wanted to row, bottom lineb2, he recalled, and put up some flyers around campus. A student-reporter picked up the story and wrote an article appealing for students to try out. The piece also mentionned that if no team was formed, ro~ving's three-year absencc \vould forcc thc LTTAA to cut the sport from the intercollegiate budget.' Interest was unexpectedly high and Boraks was left scrambling to find a coach in time for the first meeting at Hart House, but fortunately an Argonaut named Gordon Leighton agreed to help. Initially, a few experienced oarsmen appeared but were repelled by the low level of funding, equipment and organization.' Nevertheless. a core group of eighteen aspiring rowen rernained, and they forrned the crews for the I Robert Boraks, interview by author. tape recording, Belfountain, ON., 7 May, 1999. Although he staned rowing as a high-schooler, Boraks maintains that his interest in the sport was unrelated to his early recollections of Loudon. = Ibid 1974 season. Through the i970s, and indeed since then, Varsity rowing has been camed out with comparativeiy less funding and institutional leadership. Nevertheless, between 1974 and 2980 the UTRC moved relatively rapidly from basic issues of survival on minimal resources, through expansion and a search for new sources of funding, and finalIy to the ambitions of hi&-performance. That first year, one experienced oarswoman, Lyneilyn Home, had also wanted to row. Women's rowing was still new to Canada. and had not originally been part of the plan. Nonetheless, Boraks and Leighton readily agreed to accommodate them and Toronto's first-ever women's crew was recruited. The objections of the Argonaut Rowing Club were a major stumbling block. Although Canadian rowing clubs had begun to admit women in 197 1, and although Boraks and the younger ARC members favoured the move, the Argonaut board rernained stubbornly opposed, citing the absence of locker facilities.' The Varsity rowers ignored the ban and the women practiced surreptitiously in the early momings that faIl season. They got away with it until one week before the Ontario University Championships. whcn an article appeared in the Globe adMoi/. An ana Argonaut board made it clear that the UTRC \vould be banned if this continued, but in a backhanded manner allowed the women to finish their season. With the women barred from Argo grounds, the male UTRC members had to row the women's shell some 200m out to their waiting teammates. Despite this initial foray, women were excluded from the Argonaut Rowing Club until 1980. We will return to the issue of women's rowing further in this section. -- j The Varsin. (Toronto), 16 September, 1974. '' Ibid. 6 November, 1974. In addition to paying a S30 membership fee. the rowers relied entirely on funds provided by the Athletic Directorate, roughly $1200 plus meal money. Most of that went towards the rental of Argonaut equipment, and the test towards transportation. It wasn't much. In order to replace an old wooden oar which had snapped during practice, the rowers donated their lunch rnoney! The University of Toronto crews, male and female, were woeful thar first season. The women's crew, al1 novice, "finished their race at the McMaster regatta on white-capped Hamilton Bay with only three of their eight oarswornen still rowing, and then suffering the fùrther indignity of being blown sideways through the entire sailboat anchorage, before an amused crowd of spectators."' The supposedly "varsity" men's crew contained only 3 rowers with anything more than mdimentary experience. They finished last in every single race they entered, with one exception: The one race we didn't corne Iast in was at the Western regatta, rowing in the Varsity race. This American crew came from Duke. They had these huge guys, huge. And we were al1 these little guys in these decrepit old sweatsuits from the 50s. 1 think, and crappy old boats. They looked at us warming up and were chuckling at us and we felt even lower than ever..- [Ar the stan of thc nce] I realized they were as bad as we were and so I stan to yell ..let's zo!" And so we start ro\ving away. side by side. chugginç afong. just a disaster of 3 race. There were hvo races going on. There was cverybody. way down the course. and us over 500m behind ...The neatest thing was. the race \vas over and thcre \vas this big crowd on the shore. and they saw us corning down. Everybody knew us at this point- the sad-sacks of the circuit- and they saw we were head-to-head \vith these huge Arnerican guys. Everybody started cheering. encounging us. and we actually beat them. The crowd went crazy. And we went crazy. We were just so happy! Subsequently 1 did very well in races, but I don't think 1 was ever happier. seriously. than at that race. Al1 of a sudden we felt like a team!8 Ibid 23 September, 1974. The Varsir),(Toronto), 15 September, 1975. Ibid. 15 September, 1976. s Robert Boraks, interview by author. tape recording. Belfountain, ON., 7 May, 1999. The UTRC weathered the storm of ineptitude and, minus the women, returned for the 1975 season. Despite one OUAA win in an exhibition event, they were not much better that year, as the Varsiw headlines "Rowers Slow: first Mue Regatta in 4 yrs", and "U of T oarsmiths narrowly avert victory once more" atte~t.~Realizing that the UTRC could not credibly recruit and retain members by proclaiming its competitiveness, Boraks instead focussed on inclusiveness and fun. "No one was made to feel bad- we were al1 bad", he recalled. The rowing team attracted al1 kinds of students- some good athletes, but mostly what Boraks called "Ichabod Crane types", the scholarly, the gangly, the out-of-shape. Lam Marshall, who was to become a rnainstay of Toronto rowing, described himself as someone who "was fat and played the violin" when he first showed up for tryouts at the UTRC." He had wanted to play inner-tube waterpolo but had been outvoted by his fnends, who wanted to row. Although they were not fast, the rowers enjoyed themselves. The almost Monty-Pythonesque spirit of those fledgling years is captured in a black-and- white photograph which hangs in the athletic wing of Hart House- recognizable to anyone who has passed there. Pictured are the twenty-two members of the UTRC. with their backs to Lake Ontario, wearing shorts and dark singlets with a large gothic "T" emblazoned on the front. The scene is an attempted replication of an 1875 daguerrotype. Vanously the oarsmen are standing, seated or reclining. None are smiling, al1 are staring off in different directions, some have their arms crossed, others are holding ancient 9 The Varsify(Toronto), October 15 and October 1 7. 1975. 10 Lamy Marshall to author, 4 May, 1 998, author's collection. wooden oars aioft. and one is stroking his beard. I think it looks hilarious. In parodying the staid. traditional image of their sport, the rowers made it quite cIear that they intended to have a good time and party hard, no matter how slow they were on the water. This philosophy also applied to the other rowing club at the University of Toronto. Bob Boraks, who was not competing in 1976, also started a rowing prograrn at his college, Erindale. Based in suburban Mississauga, Erindale was afiliated with the Don Rowing Club. located at the mouth of the Credit River. Since the Don R.C. aIlowed women to row, there was an Erindale women's crew along with the novice and junior varsity men's eights- 26 athletes in all. Coach Robin Wight earnestly proclairned that "crews must quit smoking (because good respiration is important), curb drinking habits, do their calisthenics faithfùlly, and be prepared to give up part of their social life"." However, in proclaiming the redeeming factors of the sport the Erindale campus paper emphasized the social advantages of CO-edteams and claimed that "afier every race the beer flows like water over the blades and the oarspersons gather strength for next week's workouts."" Those early Erindale crews wcre as hapless as the St. George campus rowers had been when they staned. In their second season, at the particularly disastrous Toronto regatta; the Erindale women had a last-minute rudder mishap which forced [hem to row the race without steering controI, [and] prior to their race. the men's eight collided head-on with anothcr shcll. ripping the bow from the boat and causing it to sink. Rescue boats arrivcd within a minute and quickly whisked the men to shore and into the sauna.